David Lehmann – författare

The term ‘fundamentalism’ carries a wide range of meanings, some of them pejorative. Here it is used to refer to what the French call ‘integrism’, meaning a religious code which encompasses and governs with its prescriptions the entire private and public life of individuals and the collectivity. The prime examples in the contemporary world are Muslim renewal; Christian evangelical and charismatic churches, sects, and tendencies; and Ultra-Orthodox Judaism.These three varieties of movement represent radical departures from the traditions out of which they have grown. These new forms can be characterized in terms of their ability to plug into local cultural practices and incorporate them without theorizing; ability to provide a framework for coping with serious social ills among the marginalized; ability to create transcultural communities of individuals without regard to prior political, linguistic, or ethnic frontiers; obsessive attention to the control of sexuality, especially female; belief in the literal truth of every word in the holy text; and their emphasis on conversion as a crisis and rupture in the life of individuals.Even in its early days, Pentecostalism was a multicultural, multi-ethnic movement, drawing on black Americans, and the Mexican, European, and Asian migrant communities in America for its following. Today, in some countries (such as Nigeria and Ghana) the appeal seems to be more to the middle-class groups, while in others, such as in Latin America and the Philippines, it is most successful among the urban poor and among indigenous peoples, and represents a profound change after five centuries of a virtual Catholic monopoly.In Islam and Judaism an erudite strand of learning has co-existed with a proliferation of healers and seers. Modern Jewish fundamentalists are however overwhelmingly focused on texts, and although their heritage in Eastern Europe has a strong element of ecstatic prayer, that has tended to take second place in the post-Holocaust era to an institutionalization of learning. In Islam, likewise, the renewal movements, led usually by lay people rather than clergy (except in Iran), focus on the text of the Qur’an and are hostile to mystical heritage embodied by Sufism.This new, four-volume collection from Routledge makes available a range of materials which represent: (a) the most important recent analytical and descriptive contributions to the subject; (b) some doctrinal and historical texts; and (c) a representative coverage of the subject by theme and geographical area. It is sure to be welcomed by scholars and students as an indispensable resource for reference and research.

The studies in this book, first published in 1979, offer an all-encompassing contemporary critique of the sociology, politics and economics of development as they are ‘conventionally’ taught and disseminated. They also seek to outline the beginnings of a new approach, while not sparing from criticism the simplistic of contemporary radical theories. The reissue will prove of significant interest to the teaching of development studies at both undergraduate and post-graduate levels.

Brazil has developed a distinctive response to the injustices inflicted by the country’s race relations regime. Despite the mixed racial background of most Brazilians, the state recognizes people’s racial classification according to a simple official scheme in which those self-assigned as black, together with “brown” and “indigenous” (preto-pardo-indigena), can qualify for specially allocated resources, most controversially quota places at public universities. Although this quota system has been somewhat successful, many other issues that disproportionately affect the country’s black population remain unresolved, and systemic policies to reduce structural inequality remain off the agenda.In The Prism of Race, David Lehmann explores, theoretically and practically, issues of race, the state, social movements, and civil society, and then goes beyond these themes to ask whether Brazilian politics will forever circumvent the severe problems facing the society by co-optation and by tinkering with unjust structures. Lehmann disrupts the paradigm of current scholarly thought on Brazil, placing affirmative action disputes in their political and class context, bringing back the concept of state corporatism, and questioning the strength and independence of Brazilian civil society.

For centuries Andean civilization and ecology has afforded a special fascination for European travellers and officials. In this volume, eight writers - anthropologists, economists and historians working in Bolivia, Britain, France, Ireland and Peru - describe and analyse aspects of rural society in various Andean regions. They focus on the impact of capitalist development on both the peasant economy and the landed elite in the Andes and the ways in which that impact has been shaped by a specific Andean culture and a characteristic Andean ecology and climate. Their discussion of Andean specificity centres on the notion of verticality, first developed by John Murra to describe political and economic adaptation to climatic variation in the Andean eco-system. The volume represents a substantial contribution to our understanding of Andean rural society and the nature of the Latin American peasantry and peasant economy. It will appeal to all those interested in economic anthropology, Latin America, peasant studies and the capitalist world-economy.

For 500 years Catholicism has been the dominant religious force throughout Latin America. Its hegemony was based on a complex relationship with popular culture; the colorful and the macabre, the syncretic and the purist, the indigenous and the cosmopolitan, the popular and the erudite have combined to form a uniquely creative and reflexive cultural complex. But in the second half of the twentieth century, just as the Church sought to reform itself by proclaiming its "preferential option for the poor", some of the most charismatic forms of Protestantism, carried along by an open and aggressive hostility to the traditions of popular culture, began to establish themselves at the heart of the popular sectors themselves - in the large urban slums, among Indian groups and, increasingly, throughout other strata of Latin American societies. Today around a fifth of the population of countries like Brazil and Chile Protestant, mostly Pentecostal. Is this a new Reformation? A cultural revolution? Or merely another confirmation of the illusion of liberation?Drawing on detailed research in Brazil and extensive knowledge of Latin America as a whole, Lehmann explores the predicament of the Catholic Church in the face of the apparently irresistible rise of Pentecostalism, examines the structure and practices of the religious organizations and assesses the broader political implications of these developments. This well informed and carefully researched study sheds new light on one of the most remarkable cultural transformations of our time.

Written by scholars with long-term and in-depth engagement in Latin America, the chapters show that multicultural theories and policies, which assume racial and cultural boundaries to be clear-cut, overlook the pervasive reality of racial and cultural mixture and place excessive confidence in identity politics.

The studies in this book, first published in 1979, offer an all-encompassing contemporary critique of the sociology, politics and economics of development as they are ‘conventionally’ taught and disseminated. They also seek to outline the beginnings of a new approach, while not sparing from criticism the simplistic of contemporary radical theories. The reissue will prove of significant interest to the teaching of development studies at both undergraduate and post-graduate levels.

Building on thirty years accompanying the church’s growth, this book is the first to treat the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (UCKG) as a global organization and the first to balance the devotional and ritual life of the church with its impact on politics and the media.Based in Brazil, the UCKG claims to have 17,000 bishops and pastors, 12,300 places of worship and 10 million followers in 135 countries. Within a lifetime of fifty years it has become a model for neo-Pentecostalism worldwide epitomized by its mammoth ‘Temple of Solomon’ in São Paulo.Drawing on ethnographic research in 13 countries from Brazil and Spanish America to Europe, North America and Israel, David Lehmann demonstrates how the church’s practices, and those of Pentecostalism in general, are reshaping contemporary concepts of ritual and the supernatural. It further argues that the Church’s use of social media to spread its teachings, and its leader Edir Macedo’s extensive political, business and mediatic interests, have paved the way to a fusion of religious and secular domains.The church’s bishops, pastors and assistants mobilize their followers by age and gender and channel their commitment into activities ranging from fundraising to seniors’ gatherings to prison and hospital visiting. Gender emerges repeatedly as a central theme, expressed in the phenomenon of the childless pastoral couple, gendered self-improvement networks, the church’s messaging on relationships, ‘love therapy’ and even the provision of dating apps for the faithful.Exceeding previous work in scope and theoretical range, this book opens completely new perspectives on Pentecostalism worldwide.

After the Decolonial examines the sources of Latin American decolonial thought, its reading of precursors like Fanon and Levinas and its historical interpretations. In extended treatments of the anthropology of ethnicity, law and religion and of the region’s modern culture, Lehmann sets out the bases of a more grounded interpretation, drawing inspiration from Mexico, Brazil, Bolivia and Chile, and from a lifelong engagement with issues of development, religion and race.The decolonial places race at the centre of its interpretation of injustice and, together with the multiple other exclusions dividing Latin American societies, traces it to European colonialism. But it has not fully absorbed the uniquely unsettling nature of Latin American race relations, which perpetuate prejudice and inequality, yet are marked by métissage, pervasive borrowing and mimesis. Moreover, it has not integrated its own disruptive feminist branch, and it has taken little interest in either the interwoven history of indigenous religion and hegemonic Catholicism or the evangelical tsunami which has upended so many assumptions about the region’s culture.The book concludes that in Latin America, where inequality and violence are more severe than anywhere else, and where COVID-19 has revealed the deplorable state of the institutions charged with ensuring the basic requirements of life, the time has come to instate a universalist concept of social justice, encompassing a comprehensive approach to race, gender, class and human rights.

After the Decolonial examines the sources of Latin American decolonial thought, its reading of precursors like Fanon and Levinas and its historical interpretations. In extended treatments of the anthropology of ethnicity, law and religion and of the region’s modern culture, Lehmann sets out the bases of a more grounded interpretation, drawing inspiration from Mexico, Brazil, Bolivia and Chile, and from a lifelong engagement with issues of development, religion and race.The decolonial places race at the centre of its interpretation of injustice and, together with the multiple other exclusions dividing Latin American societies, traces it to European colonialism. But it has not fully absorbed the uniquely unsettling nature of Latin American race relations, which perpetuate prejudice and inequality, yet are marked by métissage, pervasive borrowing and mimesis. Moreover, it has not integrated its own disruptive feminist branch, and it has taken little interest in either the interwoven history of indigenous religion and hegemonic Catholicism or the evangelical tsunami which has upended so many assumptions about the region’s culture.The book concludes that in Latin America, where inequality and violence are more severe than anywhere else, and where COVID-19 has revealed the deplorable state of the institutions charged with ensuring the basic requirements of life, the time has come to instate a universalist concept of social justice, encompassing a comprehensive approach to race, gender, class and human rights.